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Getting Back to the ‘Heyday’ for Vaccines: PATH’s Batson on how ‘really smart innovations’ are bending the global health curve
Foundations and governments involved in global health are more sensitive to cost-per-solution these days. That puts an emphasis on creativity and a disciplined public-private approach going forward.
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- Health Care
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Financial Inclusion Gets to Lagos Slum
Sterling Bank’s recent extension of its financial services, through the agent banking model to Makoko, a slum area in Lagos, has attracted a lot of attention.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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In the Pacific, banks go branchless to reach the unbanked
Branchless banking, mobile banking, mobile “wallets”, innovations in financial services are seeing thousands of poor and low-income people use their mobile phones to enter the financial system for the first time; to open accounts, get paid, save money and begin to move out of poverty.
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- Uncategorized
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NexThought Monday 12/16/13: Is India looking at financial inclusion backwards?
Despite the huge potential of solutions like mobile finance and branchless banking, the growth of these services in India has been slow and patchy. But the country’s mobile banking agenda has been driven largely by government-to-person social welfare payments, compelling service providers to start with the toughest market sub-segment – poor rural households. Should India invert its approach and target business segments first?
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- Uncategorized
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How SME financial access in Africa compares to other developing economies
Africa is the world’s second fastest growing region after Asia, and has seen increasing interest from foreign and African investors. However, access to finance is – in general – still a major limitation for many African small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
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- Uncategorized
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Big banks see rich opportunities in world’s poorest
When the Afghan government used mobile phones instead of cash to pay some of its policemen, the officers thought they'd just had a 30 percent pay rise. In truth, they had just been paid the full amount, with nothing skimmed off by middlemen, for the first time.
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- Uncategorized
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Access to Basic Banking Is a Crisis for 40 Million Americans
Some 2.5 billion people have no access to basic financial products like insurance and credit cards. Fixing that would fix a lot of the world's poverty problems.
- Categories
- Education
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Why Mobile Wallets Won’t Work in India… Yet: The need is there, but obstacles remain
India has more competing mobile network operators than any other country, and it’s one of the largest and fastest growing mobile markets in the world. It’s also one of the most problematic countries for financial inclusion, with half the population lacking access to formal banking services. Mobile banking seems like an obvious solution, but as Ritesh Dhawan of MicroSave explains, implementing that solution is not so simple.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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